Seeing the Beauty in Ugliness

Look at the image above and imagine that the seesaw represents a scale of beauty from 1 – 10.

On one end of the scale represents beauty and the other end of the scale represents ugliness.

We look at people everyday and box them into lots of classifications, one of them being the box of beauty. Of course beauty is subjective and one person you might find attractive will not seem attractive to me. However, there are more or less universal beautiful people, crossing borders, and cultures.

We’ve all played the game at school ‘what would you give them, out of ten, for looks?’.

Look at the image again, take away the labels of ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ from the two figures, and what are you left with?

You are left with two figures sitting on ‘The scale of beauty’ however, since they have no labels we cannot call one more beautiful than the other or one more ugly than the other. – they just………….are!

Looking without labeling

Our lives revolve around the dualities of life: good and evil, white and black, beauty and ugliness, right and wrong, happy and sad and so on. What if we could look at life and just see what’s in front of us, without putting a label on it.

Try it. Walk down a busy street and just glance at people as they are walking past, you’ll notice you label people almost immediately: businessman, fat, skinny, gorgeous, camp, fashionable, handicapped and so on. That is just some of the labels we give. Try walking down the street and just seeing a person, it’s extremely difficult at first but with practice you will get to do it and turn of the little labelling machine you have in your head.

When the labeling machine is turned off you start to notice life in a different light and your life is a little more laid back. When you stop labeling others you will stop labeling yourself as well. You will become – just you!